Question

I am having a php form, and a lot of markup, so i need to repeat the same form for creating a new page entry and same for editing, so for example what am doing right now is

if($_GET['page'] == 'hello') {
   //A whole lot of markup goes here
   <form method="post">
     <input type="text" name="whatever" />
     <input type="submit" name="create_new" />
   </form>
} elseif ($_GET['page'] == 'edit_hello') {
   //Same form markup is here, only change is the retrieved 
   //data values are echo'ed out in respective fields
   $query = mysqli_fetch_array(mysqli_query(...));
   <form method="post">
     <input type="text" name="whatever" value="<?php echo $query['column_name']; ?>" />
     <input type="submit" name="create_new" />
   </form>
}

So any idea how can I use the same code for creating new entry as well as updating the form values

Answer 1

Use a variable and give it a default value of an empty string.

if($_GET['page'] == 'hello') {
   $whatever = "";
} elseif ($_GET['page'] == 'edit_hello') {
   $query = mysqli_fetch_array(mysqli_query(...));
   $whatever = $query['column_name'];
}

<form method="post">
   <input type="text" name="whatever"
      value="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($whatever); ?>" />
   <input type="submit" name="create_new" />
</form>

Note that I’ve also added proper escaping for you, so that you can avoid XSS attacks.